Marc Edelman's research and writing have focused on agrarian issues, social movements, and a variety of Latin American topics, including the historical roots of nationalism and contemporary politics. Most of his work has dealt with changing land tenure and land use patterns, production systems, rural class relations, and social movements in Central America. He has a longstanding concern with understanding changing forms of capitalism and with the politics of controlling markets, whether through welfare states, civil society pressure or global trade rules. During the mid 1980s, after seeing his fieldwork zone in northern Costa Rica tragically converted into a staging area for the civil war in Nicaragua, he also carried out research in the USSR and wrote extensively on Soviet-Latin American relations.

Currently, Edelman is working on a project, supported by the National Science Foundation and the PSC-CUNY Grants Program, on the efforts of transnational agrarian movements to have the United Nations approve a declaration on the rights of peasants. He recently completed a coauthored book on peasant involvement in global civil society movements and transnational networking among small farmer organizations, as well as coedited collections on global land grabs, political reactions 'from below' to landgrabbing, and critical perspectives on food sovereignty.